The CES smart phones: Big, fast and better cameras

Big, fast phones with legit cameras are shaping up as the common themes among the smart phones earning buzz so far at International CES.

The Nokia Lumia 900 features a 4.3-inch display (by comparison the iPhone 4S’s is 3.5 inches diagonally). It runs on AT&T’s LTE network, the souped-up fourth generation network that just switched on in the Bay Area. The Lumia 900 packs an 8-megapixel Carl Zeiss camera with a wide open f/2.2 aperture (meaning it gets a lot of light and produces a better quality image) and a wide-angle 28mm lens (meaning you can capture more of a scene).

The HTC Titan II features an even bigger 4.7-inch display and a full 16-megapixel camera. That’s the highest among smart phones in the U.S., according to the company. A publicist said the point is to finally put the nail in the coffin of point and click cameras. The Titan II also runs on Windows and AT&T’s LTE network.

It’s notable that the two phones that have earned the most attention so far at CES are both Windows phones. It feels a bit like a coming out party for Microsoft’s mobile operating system which, while earning critical reviews, hasn’t made much of a dent yet in the marketplace.

Some new Android phones have, of course, also been unveiled at CES, which you can read more about here or here.

One of the ones gaining the most attention is the Samsung Galaxy Note. The company didn’t do anything special with the camera, but it squarely fits my other two trends: Fast and really big.
It features a 5.3-inch display, edging up to Samsung’s own 7-inch tablet territory, and also runs on AT&T’s LTE network. The company assures us it remains “pocketable.”

The feature Samsung is playing up is a stylus that fits into the handset called the S Pen, “which delivers fast, responsive and precise control to create fine lines and detail on the device display, much like an ink pen and pad of paper.”

Hmmm. Sounds more like an unwelcome return to an earlier Palm Pilot era to me.